Journey of a Salesforce Geek

My first TrailheaDX Experience!

Last week was TrailheaDX 2018 and this was my first time going to the full conference experience from Salesforce (besides Expo). I have to say, it was definitely worth it!

My experience went a little something like this:

7am – got on a train to San Francisco to hopefully make it to a 9am event

8:50am – I finally finished going through the very long, but very quick security line (TSA you can learn some pointers)

9am – I was in line for my backpack, which had limited supply and I did not want to lose out. I was also lucky and got a Certified t-shirt, one of the more coveted Salesforce swag items.

10am – I went to the keynote, which is the only event going on at that time. I stayed through most of it and very much enjoyed the overall experience of it. I was also totally wowed by the new cloud – Integration Cloud, which I will write about more another day.

After the keynote, I wandered through the booths and stations and got my badged scanned to collect my checkpoints for the Trailhead Quest. I also grabbed lunch in which there was a selection of pre-made sandwiches (it wasn’t bad).

Then, after lunch, around 12pm, I finally made it to my first session. This was a Circle of Success session on best practices for setting up Sandboxes (more on this another time). What I didn’t know, and wish I had, was that the Success Circles were more like meetups, where there was an agenda, but you are with a small group, and it’s more about the questions of the group. It was fun to be apart of, but I didn’t go to any other sessions like that.

2pm – I was starting to feel my early morning and went to check in to the hotel. It wasn’t ready yet, but I least I got to ditch my bag.

2:30-3:30pm – I went to a couple different sessions on Apex related items and learned some interesting things that are coming down the line – like using Swagger with Apex to create Apex classes.

3:30-4pm – I had a nice coffee break with my Salesforce Rep from work

4ish to 5pm – I wandered around some more, did some trailhead badges (there was a station just for that, but I missed my chance for the Trailblazer sweatshirt).

5pm – I went to my last and favorite session of the whole conference – How to become a Salesforce Technical Architect – which is a dream of mine. It was a great presentation on the steps in the process, plus they showed off all of the new Trailmixes designed just for getting to the coveted title.

Later that evening, I joined up with the attendees at the Masonic theater for the Equality awards where I got to see Stevie Wonder live!

Day 2 – Minus not having to get up at the crack of dawn, it wasn’t much different than day 1. I attended a few more sessions, although these were held by non-Salesforce folks and felt a bit more sales oriented than the day before. And then around 3pm I packed up and went home.

Overall, I thought the conference was a cool experience and would definitely recommend it to someone who has never been. I think next year, I will probably only go for a day as I got more out of day 1 than day 2. Also, if you are comparing this to DreamForce, it’s a lot less about the basics of what Salesforce is and much more about how to use all of the tools that Salesforce provides to make the best out of the platform and the creations you can build on top of it.